Powell's Blog: WWE drops the ball on Money in the Bank promotion, and in hyping the Power to the People edition of Monday Night Raw

By Jason Powell

Monday, June 20 – 5:00 P.M. (CT)

-WWE has had some amazing Money in the Bank matches over the years. The ladder match spectacle has provided countless moments that could be pieced together into a kick ass highlight video that could get the hearts of wrestling fans pumping in anticipation of the next great MITB matches at the July pay-per-view.

So what did WWE do to promote the Money in the Bank pay-per-view during the Capitol Punishment show? They aired a commercial with Big Show reading a goddamn MITB fairy tale book to Hornswoggle.

There were no images of Shelton Benjamin's amazing ladder spots. There were no clips of Kofi Kingston past MITB performances or C.M. Punk trapping Chris Jericho's leg inside the ladder to win the match. Rather, we saw the WWE giant lying in bed with the grunting WWE dwarf who acts like a child.

What is wrong with this company? I'm sure there are some people out there who found the commercial cute, but I'd be shocked if any of those people actually felt compelled in the slightest to order the show based on that commercial.

WWE still has plenty of time left to promote the MITB pay-per-view on television, but why not do something to hook the people who care enough about the product that they actually ordered the Capitol Punishment pay-per-view?

Why not show them how breathtaking a MITB match can be and acknowledge the sacrifices that the wrestlers make in these spectacular matches? Why not drive home the percentage of wrestlers who have won the match and eventually cashed in their contract to become World Champion?

WWE desperately wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream media, yet it seems like they can't even be bothered to take their own product seriously outside of the January through April WrestleMania season.

-I'd also like to call into question the sanity of the people calling the shots at WWE for the way they've handled the "Power to the People" edition of WWE Raw. It appears to be nothing more than the "Viewer's Choice" edition of Raw with a brand new name, as the gimmick is that WWE fans will vote to determine match stipulations and whatnot.

One would naturally assume that part of their motivation would be to drive traffic to the WWE website. They announced the concept on Raw last week and I thought they would have some voting options available after the company's flagship show. Nope. Then I thought maybe they would do something on Friday after Smackdown. Wrong again.

Okay, maybe they didn't want to distract their viewers from Capitol Punishment, so I assumed they'd simply wait to unveil some voting options on Sunday night after the pay-per-view. That didn't happen either. Naturally, I assumed they were just going to roll out the categories and open up the voting on Monday morning.

Well, it's just over two hours before show time as I write this, and WWE still hasn't unveiled a single voting category. Maybe they still will prior to the show, but at this point the only real hype for Raw is the campy 42-second video they showed during last week's show. I'm sure they'll do big time web traffic during Raw tonight, but I can't understand why they gave up on the extra traffic they could have generated throughout the week.

Yes, I know the creative team is overworked and Vince McMahon seems to be booking on the fly. However, you can't tell me that the powers that be in WWE couldn't have come up with at least two or three simple categories to be strategically unveiled throughout the week to get people talking about the company, the product, and their latest three-hour special.